The Life and Times of an anarcho-syndicalist group of Bears, formerly of Manhattan, now living in Canadia.

Saturday, May 21, 2005

The Bear Award for Heroism

I was reading the New York Times this morning while eating my cinnamon-caaaandy bagel and I came acroo a hero. So we Bears created the Bear Award for Heroism so we would have something to reward him with.

Basically, a company has created an implant for servere depressioo (which has not responded to other treatments) that goes in your chest like a pacemaker, and then has wires leading into your neck, where they apply a charge to a nerve leading to the brain. There has only been one controlled experimoo of the device for use with depressioo, a double-blind experimoo in which all the participants had the device installed, but only half had it turned on, and they left the device off in the other half. The study found that the device only worked a small percentage of time (17 out of 111 of those with it turned on showed significant improvement), and worked no better in patients with the device turned on than in patients with the device turned off. Nonetheless, the FDA will quite likely move to approve the device.

Our Bear hero is Dr. Michael Thase. Despite the fact he was consulting for the company that makes the product, he still said there was "simply not a good enough basis in evidence" to approve the device. For standing by his principles, and the principles of honest scientific research instead of saying what the group doing the funding wanted him to say, we present Dr. Michael Thase with the first Bear Award for Heroism.

as a mere third year psychology student I also hear about this during classes. A lot goes around in mental disorders, like this one technique that is used for specific phobias and has suddenly jumped over to all other disorders like ptsd and depression despite that it has no empirical evidence whatsoever supporting it and people are spendings lots of money on 'treatment' and training but it ain't really doing much besides maybe curing their fear of foolishly spending their money. He. I'm way too tired to be making comments. More coffee. Hm.

The Grr am too busy bein serioos in response to this poost, but I thinks what her uses sniffin look looks to cure hers depressioo. Am much moo effective than stickin wires in yoos brain, but less interestin to be the plot o a scoo-foo novoo.